The book while leaning towards a European focus also makes sure it includes North America, Africa, Asia and South America. The focus is on various capital cities from Brussels to London to Washington to Buenos Aires to Tokyo to St Petersburg.
The build up to WWI has often framed purely in terms of rising nationalism and xenophobia across Europe, the truth however is more complex as the book extensively explores. Middle-class Europeans often travelled and mixed around Europe with ease, as Emmerson points out there were 100,000 Germans living in London alone in 1913, European monarchies were also often closely related. On the day Austria declared war on Serbia many key figures on both sides found themselves on the wrong side of the frontier. The book is a wonderful window into the past and the issues which troubled domestically at the time, often involving women's suffrage, workers rights, empire and trade. Europe was very much the centre of the world at the time, artistically, culturally, financially and militarily, the USA, Russia, China were not yet the superpowers they later became. This one continent controlled much of Africa and the Middle East and the amount of trade backwards and forwards was staggering. Emmerson also does a fine job balancing the presentation of first hand sources with analysis and also balancing facts and figures with individual sentiments and impressions of the time.
Paris is next, Emmerson focusses mostly on negative material about the decline of Paris in many observers eyes, fitting this into a wider pessimism about the future of France in a country with falling birth rates and a powerful new neighbour on it's doorstep. French art is also discussed at some length.
Berlin is portrayed as a city of paradoxes, a representation then of the Kaiser himself in that sense. Prussian militarism is every in the background.
Rome while dismissed by many at the time as simply a city of beauty and history is revealed to be a centre of Italian ambition for a greater modern Italy. The movement of futurism is also explored.
Vienna next is described while focusing more on the wider contradictions and problems plaguing the Austrio-Hungarian Empire. To many it's very existence is seen as a mystery given it's ethnic and linguistic mixtures.
Other favourite chapters for me were New York, Detroit, Algiers, Mexico City and Shanghai.
Don't buy this book expecting a detailed analysis of the factors leading up to the Great War, instead think of it as a collection of impressions of the world as it stood in 1913. I thought some of it was a bit disjointed though and it's hard to do justice to a country's culture and political problems on just 10-15 pages. All in all though a good effort and an interesting read.
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